A Very Local East London Diary

May 20, 2008

Jules Pipe Defends The Dalston Project

My recent link to Michael Rosen's article about the Dalston project for Socialist Worker prompted a fascinating and passionate comment thread, embracing most of the competing arguments about how best to bring prosperity to inner-city neighbourhoods. I'm now working on a piece for the Guardian examining those arguments a bit more closely, and invited Jules Pipe to offer a quote or two by way of defence against Michael's criticisms. He ended up doing a little more than that and, with his blessing, I reproduce it in full below.

The other year I attended the opening of Gillett Square in Dalston. Formerly a run down car-park and prostitutes’ haunt, the site had been transformed by the then Mayor of London’s 100 Public Spaces project into a vibrant urban square with the new Vortex jazz club as its anchor tenant and small retail units for local businesses. Hundreds of residents gathered to celebrate, and seemed genuinely bemused by the bedraggled handful of protestors huddled in the corner of the square carrying banners accusing myself and Ken Livingstone of "regenocide." To the majority they were baffling. How could anybody object to such an obvious manifestation of positive change?

But object a handful do, and Michael Rosen’s ill-informed stance against the Dalston development is just the latest example of the "Keep Hackney Crap" mentality so beloved of the borough’s far left contingent. The premise of Mr Rosen’s argument is an absurdist fantasy. The idea that Hackney Council is motivated by the desire to line the pockets of big business at the expense of residents is only slightly less inventive than the myriad factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated opinions that make up his article and subsequent posts. I suppose it makes a change from the other common charge of being in the pay of big business.

The Dalston development is being driven by the improvements in transport infrastructure that I and many residents have long been campaigning for, and that will genuinely transform the local economy. When the new tube line and station was proposed, there was the choice between an ugly, wide, railway cutting that TfL stated they would never allow to be built over at a later date, or a brand new development of housing, retail and a new library above the station. Unsurprisingly, the Council chose the latter and, like it or not, it was a decision made with the best interests of the borough at heart.

Another perverse target of Mr Rosen is the rubbishing of the East London Line Extension. Yes, it is being branded by TfL as “London Overground”. But, with an eventual 16 trains per hour going south from Dalston and joining what has been regarded as a tube line for decades, does it really deserve sneering observations about it being a “non-tube line”?

The problem with opinions like Mr Rosen’s is that they polarise the debate and serve to obscure the genuine concerns of local residents who want to see improvement in the area, but at the same time are worried by the effects of rising housing costs, and their fear that they or their children will be priced out of the area. Home ownership in places like Hackney is already well out of the reach of many local people. The greatest community cohesion challenge we face is ensuring our borough does not become a place accessible only to wealthy homeowners or those eligible for social housing. And before Mr Rosen cries “the answer is to build more council housing”, Hackney already has the highest percentage of social housing of any London borough and continues to build more, albeit through housing associations, including more family-sized homes than anywhere else in the capital.

As well as more affordable homes we need to increase access to intermediate housing. It means stimulating the local economy and creating more jobs to lift people out of poverty. It means continuing the rapid improvements in educational attainment and aspiration so that every young person in Hackney has access to the opportunities that the capital has to offer. Sadly for Mr Rosen and his fellow travellers, it’s going to take a lot more than a lick of paint and few trolley buses to achieve the economic transformation that the East End has needed and deserved for the last century.

My usual comments policy applies: all are welcome as long as they're interesting and reasonably polite. Guardian piece to follow.

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Comments

Just a few points on Jules' piece: the population of Hackney is a shifting one,perhaps30% pa although some of this will be intra-borough movements.Jules' "Local residents" is a dynamic concept. Meaningful in the present, nothing more. So it is entirely conceivable that Dalston could be another Notting Hill, which is a mix of rich and poor with nothing in between.
Jules is also fighting both national and global politics and markets over which Hackney Council has no control. The price of housing largely reflects land prices. Why is Hackney land so expensive? Look no further than the self-regluating tax-haven marked by the gherkin at the bottom of Kingsland Road,mopping up the nation's hottest Maths and Physics graduates as they endeavour to produce even more subtle programmes to bet on fluctuations in currency markets. The flood of bonuses surely has some effect on land prices?

I can't quite fathom Jukes' final paragraph. I hope "stimulating the local economy" doesn't just mean allowing Tesco Offshore plc
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/03/tesco.medialaw?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
to let it rip. I read it as "get a good local eduction, get out and find a good job. Come back when you can afford a mid-Victorian villa"
We are of course, thanks to TfL and freedom of movement, not constained by the frontiers of Hackney though we live in it.
Finally, why do we have to have a new library above Dalston Junction station? What will happen to the old site?

...and the number of 'affordable housing' units in the new development is how many, Jules? Not a word in your sneering rant. I wonder why... And the flogging off of 14 retail units on Dalston Lane (made derelict by Hackney Council by refusing to let the tenants either renew their leases or buy) to a single offshore owner? Not a word. That you'll remember was because, as your spokesperson says, your office was looking for a 'string of investors'. Take a look at Dalston Lane. Still derelict, years after your approved purchaser bought it. It's been firebombed twice, and who's paying the £400,000 to demolish and shore it up? Why us, of course, thanks to Jules and his cronies earmarking the dosh to do it. Hey let's throw more money at offshore millionaires, eh? Why stop there?

The 'keep Hackney crap' is a disgusting sneer. I've lived and worked in Hackney for thirty years, and have pleaded over and over again in whichever sector I've lived and worked in for improvements - mostly in education. Perhaps you've forgotten, Jules, that plenty of us have lived through a time when Hackney had education taken away from it, because you were so incompetent, during which time, you lot refused to build any new comps and were spending millions following Hackney's secondary students out of Hackney. You'll remember the mysterious closure of all the sixth forms (against popular wishes) only for them now to be...whaddyaknow...coming back.

Meanwhile, with the Dalston development, what Hackney refused to do was allow the tenants along Dalston Lane the right to develop where they lived and worked. Hackney refused to allow the other plans for Dalston Junction to be considered because it was already a done deal with TfL and the LDA. You'll have forgotten too, no doubt that the final decision to pass this development was passed by a tiny committee where the casting vote was passed by someone who failed to declare an interest. Corrupt? No, of course not.

And tell us Jules, what'll happen if the new blocks fail to sell? Who bears the cost? Who takes the risk? It wouldn't be Hackney, by any chance? Tell us please.

In the meantime, it would have been quite possible to have conserved and replanned, provided affordable housing, allowed sitting tenants to buy, if the great transport scheme had been planned as a green, low energy, low cost system eg trolley buses.

Plenty of people are trying to make Hackney better, while you spend your time working out ways of harassing Ridley Road stallholders. They might be in the way of the next great 'regeneration' scheme, mightn't they?

Meanwhile, you know as well as me that a certain Mr Cantor has been knocking on doors all over Dalston Junction offering people options they won't be able to get out of, so that suddenly we'll all wake up one day and find that Cantor owns the rest of Dalston and the next great bit of ethnic cleansing can take place.

I woke up pondering Pipe's sneer 'Keep Hackney Crap'. The point is, I don't think Hackney is crap.I've never thought Hackney is crap. I've never thought that the wrong people were living in Hackney. However, I do think the council is crap. The accusation arcs back to Pipe himself. Perhaps he thinks Hackney and its people are crap and it's his job to see it bulldozed, replanned and the the people moved on. A different matter altogether.

Over to Jules...in the meantime,Michael,feast your eyes on these..
http://www.tbus.org.uk/news.htm
To introduce such technology in the UK after 38 or so years would not be easy.
China, Russia, Switzerland, Czech Republic etc seem much more advanced than oil loving GB in this area.

We certainly have a crap Mayor. I love the way he characterised opponents of the council as "far left". Mr Rosen is of the left- so what? This Tory party member finds more commonality with his love of the borough than I do with the views of our Labour councillors. Ask Pipe to justify his council's campaign of hatred against Spirit on Broadway Market. The way that man's been treated by Pipe and his cohort of big offshore business lovers makes his claim to be on the side of small local business nauseating.